Nobody Is Coming

Every other plate on this site keeps a threat somewhere in the frame. This one deliberately does not, and the title carries the whole argument.

The room is bare and upstairs, with a sloped ceiling and a window that has nothing outside it. A woman in a denim jacket, jeans and work boots is roped to a kitchen chair, sitting well forward on the seat. She has walked the chair round far enough to get one boot heel onto a nail head standing proud of a floorboard, and she is using the nail. Her eyes are down on her own hands. The doorway is open, and it is empty, and it stays empty.

Removing the rescuer changes what the picture is about. A front with a cropped hand in the corner asks who arrives. With the doorway empty the question becomes whether she is quick enough, and the only person who can answer it has already been drawn.

The idiom belongs to the underground comic of the 1970s, a different craft tradition to the newsstand and one with none of its furniture: no process colour, no house logo, no code seal, no reserved corner for anybody. The line is dense crosshatch and stipple rather than flat fill. The title is hand lettered along the top by the same hand that drew the room. The panel border is drawn rather than ruled, and it wanders. The only colour is one flat spot ink, a dull orange, laid down a hair out of register with the black, which is what that kind of press run looked like.